Chapter 4 : The Pipeline
Hendricks stopped breathing forty meters in.
Venn caught it first — her hand on his chest where she'd been monitoring his pulse during the stretcher carry. She pressed two fingers to his throat, held them there, then looked up at Nash and shook her head. No drama. No cry. Just the quiet efficiency of someone who'd lost patients before and couldn't afford to lose time mourning them now.
The two civilians carrying the stretcher — both women from the maintenance closet — set him down on the curved floor of the pipeline. The body sagged against the metal with a soft, final sound.
"Six hours ago, I didn't know his name. Now he's dead because I chose the fast route."
"We can't carry him," Nash said, and the words tasted like ash.
"I know." Venn pulled the flak-jacket stretcher panels free, folded them, tucked them under her arm. Practical. Reusable material in a place where nothing could be wasted.
"Emperor protect his soul," Priscilla murmured.
They left Corporal Hendricks in the promethium pipeline, wrapped in his own jacket, and kept moving.
The pipe was worse than the schematics had promised. Two meters in diameter, but mineral deposits and corrosion had narrowed it in places to barely a body's width. The floor was slick — a residue of old promethium mixed with condensation, greasy and sharp-smelling. Every step required deliberation. Every handhold needed testing.
Nash led because the system painted the interior in wireframe blue, highlighting stress fractures and weak points that his actual eyes couldn't see in the near-total darkness. Behind him, Vasquez limped on his bad leg with the loaded lasgun braced against his hip. Then Priscilla. Venn. Davos, clutching his salvaged data-slate like a talisman. The two civilian women. The transit operator at the rear — a thin man named Geel, though Nash had only learned that from the system's tag.
Eight survivors. Single file. One light source — Priscilla's chemical glow-stick, its green luminescence turning everyone's skin cadaverous.
[STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY SCAN: PIPELINE SEGMENT 7-C THROUGH 12-A]
[WARNING: MICRO-FRACTURES DETECTED IN SUPPORT BRACKETS — SEGMENTS 9-B, 10-A, 10-C]
[WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION CRITICAL — RECOMMEND SINGLE-FILE PASSAGE, MINIMUM SPACING 3 METERS]
"Spread out," Nash called back, keeping his voice low. Sound carried in the pipe like a struck bell. "Three meters between each person. Walk where I walk. Don't touch the walls."
"Why not?" Geel's voice echoed, too loud.
"Because the pipe is holding together out of habit, and I'd rather not give it a reason to stop."
They spread. Nash counted steps, matching his pace to the system's overlay, following a green line that traced the strongest sections of flooring. The pipe curved downward, then up, then leveled out into a straight run that stretched beyond the glow-stick's reach.
Something scraped ahead. Metal on metal, rhythmic, like a blade being dragged across a bulkhead.
Nash raised a fist. Everyone stopped.
[MOTION DETECTED — 80 METERS AHEAD — SIGNATURE UNCLEAR]
[POSSIBLE CAUSES: STRUCTURAL SETTLING, FAUNA, HOSTILE]
The scraping stopped. Silence, except for the drip of condensation and eight people trying to breathe quietly.
It resumed. Closer now — maybe sixty meters.
Nash turned to Vasquez, held up two fingers, then pointed forward. Vasquez nodded once and raised the lasgun to his shoulder, sighting down the dark curve of the pipe. His hands were steady. The tourniquet on his leg had darkened with fresh seeping, but his face showed nothing.
They advanced. Slow. Twenty meters. Forty.
The scraping stopped again.
The system flashed:
[LIFE SIGN DETECTED — NON-HUMAN — LARGE MASS]
The glow-stick's light caught it: a shape in the pipe ahead, wedged into a section where corrosion had buckled the wall inward. Big — shoulders wider than the pipe's narrowed section, which was why it was stuck. Green skin. A crude metal plate bolted to one arm. An Ork, trying to force itself through a gap that was six inches too narrow, scraping its armor against the walls with each attempt.
It saw the light and bellowed. The sound hit Nash's chest like a physical force, reverberating through the pipe until his teeth ached.
"It's stuck," Vasquez said. Flat. Professional.
"Put it down before it gets unstuck."
Vasquez fired twice. The first bolt hit the Ork's shoulder — it roared louder. The second punched through its open mouth and out the back of its skull. The roaring stopped. The body sagged, wedged tighter in the gap, blocking the pipe.
[THREAT NEUTRALIZED: 1 ORK BOY — SEPARATED FROM WARBAND]
[PIPELINE OBSTRUCTION: HOSTILE REMAINS BLOCKING PASSAGE]
It took them twenty minutes to haul the corpse aside. Nash and Vasquez did most of the pulling while Davos wedged a piece of broken grating under the body for leverage. The Ork weighed more than three of them combined, its flesh dense with fungal muscle, its blood thick and dark and stinking of something chemical. Nash's arms burned. His lower back — still sore from the pipe fitting in the bunker — screamed at every pull.
When they finally dragged the corpse far enough to squeeze past, Nash's hands were slick with alien blood. He wiped them on his clerk's robes and kept moving.
"On Earth, the worst thing I ever had to move was a server rack during an office renovation. I threw out my back and took two days off work."
His mouth was dry. Hunger had settled into a dull, constant ache below his ribs — they hadn't eaten since before the bunker breach, which made it close to four days for Nash. The body ran on adrenaline and whatever dregs of nutrients the system was optimizing.
The pipe climbed. Steeper now, the footing worse, the promethium residue pooling in the low points so they had to wade through ankle-deep chemical slick. One of the civilian women — Maret, the system tagged her — slipped where the pipe angled sharply upward. Her feet went out from under her and she slid backward toward a maintenance shaft grate that the system had flagged as structurally compromised.
Nash caught her wrist. His grip almost broke — the desk-worker arms had nothing in them, and Maret's weight plus momentum nearly pulled him flat. He braced his foot against a pipe bracket and hauled, the tendons in his forearm standing out like cords, until Priscilla grabbed his belt from behind and added her weight.
Maret came up gasping, fingernails digging into Nash's hand hard enough to draw blood.
"Th-thank you."
"Keep your hands on the wall. Follow the dry patches."
She nodded. Her eyes were too wide, the whites showing all around, but her feet moved.
[STRUCTURAL WARNING: CRITICAL FAILURE IMMINENT — 20 METERS AHEAD]
[SUPPORT BRACKETS 10-A AND 10-C: LOAD TOLERANCE EXCEEDED]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO COLLAPSE: 6-12 MINUTES]
Nash stopped the group with a raised hand. The system painted the stretch ahead in angry red — a section where two support brackets had buckled inward, the ceiling sagging, hairline cracks running through the ferrocrete casing like veins.
"One at a time," he said. "Crawl. Distribute your weight across hands and knees. Don't stand up. Don't rush."
"What happens if we stand?" Davos asked.
"Two tons of pipe drops on our heads."
Nobody asked another question.
Venn went first — lightest, most controlled movement. She crossed in forty seconds, belly-crawling through the sagging section, the ceiling groaning above her. Davos next. Then the civilians, one by one, Nash whispering guidance from behind, watching the system's stress indicators tick upward with each crossing.
Vasquez was second to last. His bad leg dragged, the tourniquet catching on rough metal. Halfway through, his knee slipped and his weight shifted — the ceiling cracked. Dust rained down. A bracket squealed.
"Don't stop," Nash said. Quiet. Steady. "Keep moving, Corporal."
Vasquez crawled. Nash watched the stress indicators climb — 87%, 91%, 94% — until Vasquez cleared the section and pulled himself upright on the other side.
Nash went last.
The ceiling was lower now, the cracks wider. The system screamed red in his peripheral vision as he pushed himself forward on elbows and knees, the ferrocrete above him groaning like a wounded animal. His back scraped the sagging surface. Dust filled his mouth.
He cleared it by three meters.
The section collapsed behind him with a sound like a cannon shot — tons of pipe and ferrocrete crashing inward, sending a shockwave of air and dust that knocked him flat. The glow-stick went out. Total darkness for five heartbeats until Priscilla cracked a fresh one.
Nobody spoke. They stared at the wall of rubble where the passage had been.
"No going back," Geel said. His voice cracked on the second word.
"We weren't going back anyway," Nash said. "Keep moving."
The pipe ended forty minutes later.
Not gradually — it simply opened, a circular mouth spilling them into blinding light. Nash shielded his eyes, tears streaming, his pupils contracting after hours of chemical-stick darkness. The system adjusted faster than his biology, filtering the glare into usable data.
[PIPELINE EXIT: SECTOR 7 SURFACE — INDUSTRIAL PLAZA]
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: ELEVATED — ORK ACTIVITY DETECTED — MULTIPLE SIGNATURES]
He blinked until shapes resolved. A plaza, open and rubble-strewn, ringed by the skeletal remains of industrial buildings. Smoke drifted from fires burning somewhere to the north. The sky was the color of dirty copper — atmospheric pollution mixing with whatever the bombardment had thrown up.
And Orks.
Two of them, thirty meters from the pipe exit, crouched over something on the ground — a broken piece of machinery, pulled apart for salvage. Smaller than the ones in the bunker, leaner, with patchy armor and crude weapons. Stragglers. Separated from the main warband and scavenging.
They hadn't noticed the humans yet. The pipe exit was behind a collapsed wall section, partially screened by rubble.
Nash eased back from the opening and caught Vasquez's eye. Held up two fingers. Pointed left, then right. Vasquez nodded, the lasgun already coming up.
Nash picked up a chunk of ferrocrete from the rubble pile. Hefted it. The system helpfully informed him his throwing accuracy was abysmal, but the Orks were thirty meters away and he wasn't aiming for their heads — he was aiming for the machinery pile behind them.
He threw. The ferrocrete hit a metal panel with a clang that echoed off the plaza walls. Both Orks turned toward the sound, presenting their backs.
Vasquez fired twice. Two headshots. Two bodies dropped.
The silence after was almost worse than the noise.
[THREAT NEUTRALIZED: 2 ORK BOYZ — STRAGGLERS]
[XP GAINED: 50 — COMBAT (TEAM COORDINATION)]
[TOTAL XP: 150]
Nash exhaled. His fingers ached from gripping the pipe's edge. Behind him, Geel — the transit operator — made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
"That's twice now," Vasquez said, limping up beside him. "You throw, I shoot."
"Playing to our strengths."
The ghost of something appeared on Vasquez's face. Not quite a smile. Too early for smiles.
"You have a family, Corporal?"
The ghost vanished. Vasquez checked his lasgun's charge indicator. "Had a sister. Spire district."
The spire district — the first target of the orbital drop. Nash didn't press.
They stepped into the plaza. Eight survivors, blinking in toxic daylight, the sounds of a dying city all around them — distant explosions, the guttural rhythms of Ork war-chants, the crackle of fires consuming what was left of four hundred million lives.
The pipeline was behind them. No way back through the collapse.
Nash scanned the plaza edge, system highlighting potential routes, shelter points, threat vectors — and froze.
[WARNING: SIGNIFICANT ORK PRESENCE — 200+ METERS NORTH]
[ENCAMPMENT DETECTED — ESTIMATED HOSTILES: 40-60]
[YOU HAVE EMERGED WITHIN THE REAR PERIMETER OF AN ORK STAGING CAMP]
"Of course we did."
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